I know the qu estion looks rediculious considering how most Finns look, but I was reading the Wikipedia article for "Mongoloid" and I read this line:
Arthur de Gobineau defined the extent of the Mongolian race, "by the yellow the Altaic, Mongol, Finnish and Tartar branches
Was the idea that Finns were Mongolian ever have support in America at any time? Did American Finns have to fight to be considered white?
Also, where did that idea come from? When I think of Finnish people I think of people who are blonde haired and blue eyed, not Mongolians
The name "Finns" or "Finnish" was at one time used to refer to the "Sami" or Lappland people of Northern Scandanavia. The Norwegians called them "Finns" from the time of the Eddas and Norse Sagas until fairly modern times.
("Finn" may come from "finna" (Old Norse) meaning "to find", and referring to nomads who "found" their food, rather than grew or raised it.)
Finns from Finland, as opposed to from Lappland, were called "Kvens" in Norway up through the 19th century.
Of course, Finns and Sami both speak variations (multiple variations in the case of the Sami - 10 different Sami languages) of the Uralic language group (also spoken in Estonia and Hungary, but few other places in Europe, most European languages belonging to the Indo European language group).
Both Finns and Sami are probably related genetically both in the distant past and more recently. Both are much more European genetically than Asiatic, but the Sami were long thought (seemingly incorrectly) to be slightly more Asiatic than the Finns. (Finns are thought to be genetically about 80% from a single ancient North East Europe population the most genetically similar to Cro Magnon Man of any population. 10% of Finnish genes are thought to be those shared with Siberian populations).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finns
(Sami on the other hand seem to have an even greater European genetic heritage, though some of their haplotypes have not been found in any other populations in the world.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_genetics_of_the_Sami
In any event, in the 19th century, it was believed (incorrectly) in the scientific community that "Finns" (perhaps mostly referring to Sami, rather than Finns from Finland) were predominantly or significantly an Asiatic people.
As far as I know, this scientific classification did not affect any of the Finns who emigrated to the United States. There were many who came to Gloucester and Rockport in Massachusetts to work in the granite quarries in the 1800s. They had no doubt the same problems as most non-English speaking European immigrants, but, as far as I know, no more.
where did that idea come from?
From what I gather, linguistics. Finnish as a language is distantly related to languages such as Nenets, whose speakers look like this, and at the time, people assumed that a common linguistic ancestry implied a common ethnic ancestry as well. It's one of the reasons why Hitler used the term 'Aryans' to refer to northern Europeans, despite the fact that the real 'Aryans' were in fact the ancestors of people from the north of India. Caucasoid people were in general classified into 3 main races: the 'Hamitic' race, who lived in the Horn of Africa and spoke Cushitic languages such as Somali, the 'Semitic' race, who spoke Semitic languages and lived in the Middle East/North Africa, and the 'Aryan' race, who spoke Indo-European languages. The Aryan race was then subdivided into even more subraces such as Nordic, Alpine, Mediterranean, Dinaric, Armenoid etc, which were more phenotypically determined. So to summarise, races used to be determined as much by linguistics and culture as they were by their physical appearance.
